The Final Three: Green!

Ben BleiweissWednesday, August 06, 2008

ello everyone, and welcome back to Building on a Budget, the article dedicated to building decks that cost 30 tickets or less using Magic Online prices! If you tuned in last week, you'll know that this is one of my last three columns on this web site. In the meanwhile, the current series I'm working on involves taking 35 random budget rares (each of which costs .25 to .5 tickets) in a single color, adding in 25 lands, and seeing where the deck would take me from there. This week's color? Green!

Before we get started, I will say that this article is a little truncated due to two major factors, the first being that I just spent the entire last week at the U.S. National Championships for Magic: The Gathering, working the StarCityGames.com booth with Ken Adams and Wes Moss. The second? My wife Kate and I just celebrated our one-year anniversary yesterday (I love you Kate!), so I didn't have as much time as usual to work on this article. Do not fear! Next week's article will finish up the green evolution, and do the entire red evolution at one time—it'll be a supersized BoaB extravaganza!

All right, so onto the deck! I took my handy-dandy spreadsheet of budget rares, and rolled my random numbers on random.org to randomly select from the following list:

Keys to the game: Deathtouch only triggers when damage is dealt, so Sekki was the way I was finally able to get through his wall of Winnowers!

Game 3: Endless_Cochroaches (Black-Green Elves)

I could tell you about what happened during this epic game, but in this case the screenshot really is worth a thousand words.

Click to enlarge!

I wish we'd been able to play this out, ya know?

Record: 3-0

Keys to the game: After the game, Endless_cochroaches says that he had multiple Viridian Longbows that he never drew. He'd need to get two in one turn to slip it past Glissa, at the cost of eight mana: one to play the first, three to equip it (I destroy it in response), one more to play the second, and three more to equip it.

Keys to the game: I had no way to deal with an enchantment, which is very much "not green" (green should easily deal with both enchantments and artifacts). The question is: which enchantment destruction spell would I want to add to this deck? Signs point towards something like Indrik Stomphowler, to keep up the theme of midrange to huge fatties that has been doing well so far.

I then get down Spike Tiller and Stone-Tongue Basilisk, and sennin_pl starts rebuilding with another Lord of the Undead (bringing back the first), a Gravedigger, and Call to the Grave. I drop Plated Slagwurm, and then use Loaming Shaman to dump all of his zombie cards back into his library. I then start activating Kamahl on each of our turns, targeting his lands on his upkeep (so he has to sacrifice them to Call to the Grave) and targeting mine on my turn (so I can lose my least important resource). After a couple of turns of this, I finally hit seven cards in my graveyard for threshold, allowing me to swing with my entire team. That means Stone-Tongue Basilisk can kill all five opposing creatures in one fell swoop, while the rest of my creatures get +3/+3 thanks to Kamahl, finishing the game in a single turn!

Record: 4-1

Strangely enough, this deck has worked the absolute best (out of the gate) so far out of the three rare-centric decks! The assortment of large fatties (many of which have been good to have in different situations) has worked well, and I have the ability to just turn the game around by dropping huge creature after huge creature mid-to-late game. Do I want to focus on Nature's Will and creatures like Rhox and Thorn Elemental? Would it be better to have utility fat (Patron of the Orochi) or huge beaters (Plated Slagwurm)? Do I need more artifact and enchantment kill? Tune in next week to see the big finish to the evolution of the Final Three: Green deck, and the full evolution of the Final Two: Red deck! See you in 7!